Persons having reduced or totally impaired hearing faculties are often at risk of not being notified of dangerous smoke or fire conditions detected by conventional audible smoke alarms. The risk is particularly apparent when hearing impaired persons are travelling overnight and find need to stay in hotels, motels, inns or the private homes of friends. Such accommodations may not have sufficient facilities for alerting hearing impaired guests in the event of emergency due to fire or smoke.
There are at least two potentially tragic situations of particular concern to the hearing impaired. One situation involves smoke and fire overcoming the hearing impaired person in his or her own room because the audible alarm signal produced by the smoke detector in the room could not be heard by the person, for example while sleeping. Another situation involves fire or smoke activating an audible alarm smoke detector located in a remote part of the building. The hearing impaired person, being unaware of the emergency condition, may be needlessly trapped by an ensuing inferno.
Some previous visual signalling systems for the hearing impaired require that separate units be hard wired together, which requires unsightly wires to be installed around walls and stairwells or requires expensive rewiring of established buildings. In addition, these systems are not readily transferrable to other buildings and thereby have limited utility. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,810,170, issued to R. F. Zinsmeister on May 7, 1974, in which the system is intended to be installed in buildings, such as dormitories, specifically designed to be occupied by hearing impaired persons.
Another visual signalling system, disclosed in U.S. Pat. 4,365,238, issued to Kollin on Dec. 21, 1982, for hearing impaired involves several sound detector devices to detect the audio emissions of various sources of sound, such as an audio alarm smoke detector, and to transmit a radiowave signal indicative of the type of sound detected to a central logic unit. The central logic unit then transmits a signal over the electrical power lines of a building to turn household lamps on and off at a predetermined frequency to convey to a hearing impaired person what type of audio event has taken place. This system requires at least three modules to operate and requires careful and arduous set-up. The Kollin system requires a central logic unit, a separate sound detector device for each source of sound which is to be placed adjacent the source of sound, and control modules to receive commands over the electrical power lines from the central logic unit and to switch a lamp on and off at a predetermined frequency. Thus, the Kollin system is bulky, inconvenient to transport and relies on preexisting smoke detectors and lamps that may not be available.
An object of the present invention is to avoid the hazards and deficiencies of the previous smoke detector systems.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a smoke detector unit with a extremely high intensity visual alarm wherein the unit can operate alone, or in conjunction with other similar units without requiring special wiring or special central control units.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a compact smoke detector unit which can be easily transported and quickly installed in virtually any room so that any one room or building need not be specially equipped and dedicated for use by hearing impaired persons.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a smoke detector unit which can be supplied to hearing impaired customers by public lodging facilities or carried by the hearing impaired person in his luggage or on his person.